Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to making secure payments using cash substitutes at a point of sale (POS) and, more particularly, to making payments securely with a personal identification number (PIN) using chip-based payment cards such as the EMV card.
Related Art
Integrated circuit (IC) cards, also known as “Chip and PIN” cards or Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) cards have become the standard financial transaction cards, also known as credit or debit cards, that are used in Europe. EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) is a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC cards or “chip cards”) and IC card capable point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating credit and debit card transactions for payments. EMV payments can be processed through chip and PIN, in which a payment card that includes an embedded smart card is first read at the POS and then the user enters a PIN for authentication, typically using a keypad on the POS terminal, and commonly referred to as “chip and PIN payments”.
Modern mobile devices are capable of acting as POS terminals using a card reader in communication with the mobile device, such as the PayPal Here™ card reader device offered by PayPal of San Jose, Calif. However, most card readers including the PayPal Here™ card readers are currently only able to process traditional magnetic stripe financial transaction cards. Efforts to develop an IC chip reader for use with a mobile device have had difficulty in gaining approval and certification due to the inherent insecurity of the mobile device. For example, a mobile device may have malware executing on it, which may be designed to capture a user's PIN or other information from the IC chip that could be read by a plug-in IC chip reader.
Embodiments of the present disclosure and their advantages are best understood by referring to the detailed description that follows. It should be appreciated that like reference numerals are used to identify like elements illustrated in one or more of the figures, in which the showings therein are for purposes of illustrating the embodiments and not for purposes of limiting them.